• Nick Yeates
• Yu-Ting Tu (Tim)

We propose to re-plan and partially implement an existing, real-life database that is currently used by the UMBC Graduate School. The current version of the database is complete and held in Microsoft Access, but the foundations of the tables and planning are inconsistent with database management methodologies.

The business problem that the original database solved was to track faculty and perform business functions with that information. What we will be solving by re-planning and implementing is to continue the original solutions in addition to fixing data accessibility, and maintenance issues. The Microsoft Access platform contributes to many of these problems; such as multiple users being unable to edit the data, and public webpage views not being possible. Also, we hope to ease future modifications and requests by making the architecture more accurate.

• Associate Deans Office
• Associate Deans Executive
• Administrative Assistant
• Events Coordinator
• Student Assistants

• University faculty and applying faculty
• Registrar
• Thesis and dissertation committee members
• Department faculty, staff, and heads
• Graduate Students

• Allow the Graduate School to keep track of Graduate faculty and their associated data. Associated data are things such as membership status, school attended, accomplishments, educational background, exam committee experience, etc.
  • Entities for this function: Faculty, Education, Accomplishment, Affiliation, Course
• Allow limited web page viewing access to the public for a variety of reasons
  • Allow grad students access to the data when forming thesis and dissertation committees
  • Allow department access for course assignments
  • Allow public web access for other undetermined users and uses
• Allow a mechanism for updating the faculty by multiple employees
• Allow internal printing of mailing labels
• Allow tracking of which department and program the faculty belongs to
  • Entities for this function: Department, Program
• Allow emails of professors to be tracked for use in a mailing list
  • Entities for this function: Faculty
• Checking of committee status correctness against other data sources and forms
  • Entities for this function: Faculty, Status_Lookup, Department, Program
• Support annual ellections for Graduate Council 1).
  • Nominated members must be a Graduate Faculty member
  • Voting users can only be current faculty
  • Graduate Council is a joint effort with UMB, but UMBC still elects their own seperate members from UMB
• Allow special members terms to be tracked and/or notify staff member when they end 2)
  • This could be found off of current_status and Date of Termination fields
  • Notification by the system to staff is an advanced feature that may not be implemented in this upgrade
• Allow tracking of committee service / attendance
  • There are requests for how many committees a professor has sergved on at UMBC.
  • This is an advanced feature that may not be implemented in this upgrade
• Support future possible data needs such as reports and queries pertaining to faculties associated data.

• Faculty
• Education
• Accomplishment
• Affiliation
• Status_Lookup 3)
• Course 4)

• Department 5)
• Program 6)